Business mentoring – do you help another business along?

Been thinking about Business mentoring this week as I have one company coming to the end of their 6 month mentoring period and another just started.

What I like to do to get things going is have a chat over a coffee where I explain the kind of businesses I am involved in before we move on to theirs. I do it this way to take the pressure off the mentee as sometimes it can be a little daunting explaining all your business issues to someone you really don’t know yet.

Trust is all part of this too. They need to know what I do not have a competitive business and will not just pinch their idea and copy it. Once all these preliminaries are out of the way, we can start to have useful sessions where things are agreed at one meeting and are completed or shelved for a reason that makes sense, by the time the next date rolls round.

The most important characteristic I am looking for is a hunger for new information and ideas that will help the mentee get to where they want to go. This is easy to spot where it is absent. You know the kind of person, that puts up objections to every suggestion. If that is the case, there is no point in them meeting me and no reason for me to continue the process. The best ones are those that are eager to discuss their issues and even keener to hear how they can sort them out. Luckily, I have been involved in several very different businesses over the past few years so have experience of overcoming many tricky situations and this experience is what I draw on when discussing the problems the mentees have to deal with.

But why do it in the first place. Well, the reason I do it is twofold. Firstly, it is usually a very enjoyable process and secondly, why not?